Health care such as prevention of life-style related diseases including metabolic syndrome and diabetes, diet, and medical services is attracting attention. When such health care is performed, process of finding a problem of own lifestyle habits and improving the problem, by recording lifestyle habits such as daily exercise and meals, is needed.
For example, as a preventive measure related to the “meal”, a control method of the meal for “when”, “what”, and “how many” is mentioned as follows. Particularly, items such as having three meals regularly (when), having breakfast (when), taking a balanced nutrition (what), not having too much calories (how many), and cutting down on salt (what), are mentioned.
For example, when there is a record of “when” a user ate, a service of detecting irregular eating habits and providing preventive advice can be performed.
For example, as an example of a technique of performing meal determination, an eating behavior detecting system, an utterance/eating and drinking condition detecting system, and an eating behavior detecting device are suggested. For example, in the eating behavior detecting system, the meal determination is performed by detecting a movement of lifting an arm up and down when eating food, by using an acceleration sensor. In addition, in the utterance/eating and drinking condition detecting system, mastication when eating food is utilized to detect a frequency pattern of body sound that is unique to mastication. In addition, in case of the eating behavior detecting device, in a situation where an infrared sensor is installed on a table, or the like, threshold processing is performed for whether a human body frequently moves after the human body is detected near the table.
However, any of these techniques has limitation in a way of meal or limitation of a place where the eating behavior is estimated, for estimating the eating behavior. Thus, they lack versatility in a way. For example, a tendency of acceleration estimated by the eating behavior detecting system only corresponds to one side of arm movement performed when eating food. When the other arm movement is performed, the tendency of acceleration is different. Therefore, detection failure occurs. In addition, in a case of the utterance/eating and drinking condition detecting system, a microphone is mounted around the neck during the meal time. This applies a burden to the body and makes one's appearance look bad. In addition, in the eating behavior detecting device, only meals in a fixed environment such as a place where the infrared sensor is installed, can be recognized.
In addition, as an example of techniques using pulse waves for the meal determination, a life management terminal device is also suggested. In this life management terminal device, it is determined that the user is having a meal when, in addition to the appearance of mastication characteristics generated during a meal time, the pulse rate increases, and there is no sharp rise in the skin conductance rate.
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